Transcript | The Future, Made in China: Evan Osnos on America's Reckoning
Transcript (courtesy of the fantastic CadreScripts) further down the page. Image by Keya Zhou. Listen in the embedded player above!
This week on Sinica, I welcome back Evan Osnos of The New Yorker, whose marvelous new essay, “The Future, Made in China,” chronicles a tech-focused return trip to Beijing, where he lived from 2005 to 2013 — first for the Chicago Tribune, then as The New Yorker’s China correspondent. Evan is the author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, which won the National Book Award, as well as Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury and The Haves and Have-Yachts.
His essay is far more than another breathless account of China’s advances in robotics and electric vehicles. It’s a meditation on what China’s technological ascent means for the United States, for how both societies are organized, and for the rest of us, whose futures increasingly seem to be wagered by two small circles of powerful men in Beijing and Washington. We talk about the Xiaomi Hyperfactory, “Chinamaxxing,” the export control debate, and the deeper contest Evan identifies: not democracy versus authoritarianism, but humanism versus scientism.
3:04 – Walking Beijing’s streets again: quieter, richer, more surveilled
11:26 – The Xiaomi Hyperfactory: choreography, awe, and what’s actually real
18:10 – Doomed to coexist: Evan’s message for the American reader
24:15 – Schrödinger’s China: joke or juggernaut?
27:16 – The limits of knowability in an increasingly opaque system
31:56 – Threat narratives vs. “Chinamaxxing”: America’s two China conversations
43:20 – “Thank Trump”: America’s self-inflicted wounds
47:29 – Revisiting the Sullivan doctrine and export controls
53:10 – Mankind 2000: humanism, scientism, and rival oligarchies
1:02:48 – Convergence: arriving at dystopia from opposite directions
1:07:21 – Self-strengthening redux: Levenson and America’s meum-verum gap
1:17:53 – The other Sputnik moment: the backlash against tech oligarchy
Paying It Forward
Yi-Ling Liu, author of The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet — Evan admires how her work grapples with the competition between scientism and humanism across national borders.
Chang Che, who writes for The New Yorker and The Guardian — watching China’s technological developments up close, “creating history in real time.”
Recommendations
Evan: How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University by Theo Baker — the youngest-ever Polk Award winner on how a rising generation at Silicon Valley’s feeder school perceives its opportunities and obligations. Also True Grit by Charles Portis — splendid, sentence-savoring dialogue.
Kaiser: Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams, author of Stoner — a Western with the same sentence-level craft; for fans of Melville and Cormac McCarthy.
Transcript
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from my home in Beijing. Listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at sinicapodcast.com. I know there are a lot of Substacks out there, and they start to add up because there’s so many good ones, but this one really does deliver value for money with great content from wonderful partners like Trivium and the China Global South Project, so please do subscribe so I can continue to bring you these conversations and lots more.
Today on Sinica, I am delighted to welcome back Evan Osnos of The New Yorker. Evan, as many of you know, was in Beijing for a good stretch during that oft-nostalgized golden age in the capital as a correspondent, first for the Chicago Tribune from 2005, and then after 2008, for The New Yorker until he headed back to the States in 2013, I believe. He is the author of The Outstanding Age of Ambition, which won the National Book Award in 2014 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist the following year. He’s since written a couple of books, Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury, which is just a fantastic one, and The Haves and the Have-Yachts, which I have yet to read, but I’m really looking forward to, in addition, of course, to dozens and dozens of widely read profiles on important American political figures, mostly named Joe, Joe Manchin, Joe Biden.
Earlier this month, Evan published a marvelous essay chronicling a recent tech-focused trip back to China, his old stomping ground, where he spoke with people ranging from grandees of the Chinese tech scene, like Li Kai-fu, to delivery drivers, visited all manner of tech companies, and of course just sort of pounded the pavement and checked out his old digs. The essay is called The Future Made in China, and if you’ve not had a chance to read it yet, do hit pause and take, you know, 40, 45 minutes to do so, and then come back.
Anyway, this was, as I hope you’ll know now, far more than just another breathless account of China’s mind-blowing advances in robotics and electric vehicles and yada, yada, of the sort that we’re so used to seeing these days. It’s actually a meditation, I think, on what China’s technological ascent means for the United States, for the way both societies are organized, and really for the rest of us, whose futures increasingly seem to be wagered by two small circles of powerful men in Beijing and Washington. It’s reported with the eye and written with the grace that made Age of Ambition so indispensable. He joins us from D.C. And Evan, welcome back to Sinica.
Evan Osnos: Thank you very much, Kaiser. It’s always great to be with you.
Kaiser: Evan, you lived in Beijing, I think I have those dates, right? 2005 to 2013?
Evan: Yeah.
Kaiser: And Age of Ambition was, I think, in many ways, a book about individual aspiration, about people hurtling themselves at the future with an optimism that kind of bordered on recklessness. I think it captured the zeitgeist of that time where we were both living in China, the good and the bad of those years, which, again, I mean, we both experienced that very much at first hand, and it was just such a true account. Now you return, and you find a city that’s quieter, it’s richer, certainly. It’s more convenient and more automated.
I’m always sort of impressed with how seamless the whole kind of digital experience is. But it’s also more surveilled.
Evan: Yeah.
Kaiser: In some sense, sadder. I would hesitate to generalize on that sadder bit. But before we get into any of the geopolitics or too much of the tech stuff, I just really want to get a sense from you how it felt just at a personal level to walk those streets again. Where did your old instincts as a resident really serve you well? And where do they maybe even mislead you or set up false expectations?
Evan: Well, this is not, you know, certainly not the first time I’ve been back. And I tend to come back every couple of years and try to get my arms around what the latest mood is like. And I think you captured it well in the sense that one of the things that you are really struck by right now is the fact that there is a feeling of kind of technological saturation. It just is everywhere. And, you know, you kind of remember Age of Ambition.
And it’s, in that book, one of the little tiny themes that I think probably a lot of readers read right by. But if you were a China person, if you’d spent a lot of time in China, people often would bring this up, which was this pattern of people out in the countryside building things, sometimes wild things. And they were known as the peasant da Vinci’s. That’s what an artist-
Kaiser: Yeah. The submarine guy, the flying machines guy, right. The robots.
Evan: So, yeah, it’d be somebody in a village far from the sea who decided that really his life’s destiny was to build the world’s most perfect wooden submarine or something like that. There’s a reason why these became kind of these iconic objects, because they represented this slightly madcap sense of ambition, to use the relevant word. But what it really, for me at least, seemed to capture was this idea of this
